| JamesDragonrider | Sunday, February 18, 2024 - 10:04 pm 
The down side of having your corporations sell to others is that you might make less of a profit vs buying off the market at the lowest price point, while selling at the highest price point.
The up side is: your corporation wont stop producing over a shortage of that item if you can't get on for a few game months. Miss 1 real day, and you've missed 6 game months. Go away for the weekend, and a year has passed in game.
Okay, so you've decided you definitely want your corporation to sell to another corporation, at least some of the produce, how do you want to set that up?
My suggestion is that you set up 2 trade agreements on the new corp.
First one will be for the full amount of the corporations needs.
2nd one will be for a limited time, to front load the inventory.
For example:
Corporation A needs 40k chemicals per month for full production.
You set up 2 40k contracts, 1 "until cancelled" and the other for 4 months, to get to your desired reserve amount.
Your Corp C that produces chemicals should then have a reserve set for 120k chemicals. (Or an additional 120k, if you already had a reserve set.)
You will have to manually set the reserve to make it higher than your contracts.
Why do you want to set a reserve higher than contracts?
So you don't cause a supply chain interruption.
Imagine you have a 6 month reserve in a company, and you have a trigger to buy at 5 months. Missing a month will cause the company to then purchase 7 months of that item, basically doubling the reserve you now have in the company for those goods.
You might also pay more, or get a lower quality of goods, or both.
Even if you had a higher value, such as 8 months, and you miss a month, dropping you down to 7, the supplying company wont make up that missed shipment, as there is no back order function in the game, which means the next miss drops you to 6, etc. Eventually it might trip an automatic buy order.
But if you have a reserve of 3 months, that gives you nearly a full day to correct a shortage, or for the shortage to correct itself automatically.
Also, if you have 3, or more, corporations in a supply chain, you protect the down the line corporations from having an interruption.
Let's say that you're waiting on company A to get a wind farm delivered.
It runs out of stock, and doesn't come back online for 6 months.
Now, company B, which was depending on A, runs into a shortage, and the goods are short in the global market, so the automatic order isn't filled either, and the company also runs out of stock reserves, causing B to stop selling to C. Etc.
Having 3 months in each corp would likely prevent company C from ever being affected, even if company B gets affected.
What you probably don't want to do is to buy a windfarm (75 Billion) at the "buy it now" price, that might be 300% or higher. (225B+)
By shifting from the inventory buffering to the produce buffering, you protect your entire supply chain, and also effectively build in "back ordering" up to 2 months of additional supply,that will get replenished when the company gets back online.
Saves money in the long run, and reduces the chances a company will be shut down for supply chain shortages. |
